History and Schizophrenia

History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History begins by expressing surprise at the various claims that fall under the rubric of history today. Cohen asks why contemporary culture values historicism so highly and allows it to acquire the force of necessity.

“Always historicize!” is Fredric Jameson’s famous command in the opening of The Political Unconscious (1981). He humorously adds that it is almost possible to consider this a transcendental or “transhistorical” imperative (9). Of course the concept of history must only be almost transcendental, must always stop short of being a noncontingent evaluative principle, which Jameson acknowledges. Absent that delimitation it would not, according to habitual and circular thinking, be judged rigorously “historical.” Cohen sees this general historicizing tendency as culturally symptomatic, hardly restricted to Jameson or to Marxist criticism. Covering a variety of topics, from Deleuze’s theory of repetition and Derrida’s reading of Marx to the politics of the Los Angeles art world and Taiwanese resistance to the “one China,” History Out of Joint is above all distinctive for its sustained effort to bring something like the full weight of the postmodern condition—including media saturation, the cultural effects of globalization, skepticism about linguistic referentiality—to bear on historiography. Just as the “critiques of metanarratives” have “unsettled historical synthesis,” historians writing in the age of hypertext may no longer “trust in the sense of continuity of plot if their readers are increasingly pre- and postliterary” (History 106, 104). At times the territory appears too vast to map or, at the very least, resistant to the micro-examination Cohen evidently prefers. Put still another way: his approach raises the question whether a subject as large as history, or as the end of history’s descriptive efficacy, may be addressed comprehensively through selective readings of uses of history. However, even the book’s most contestable critical interventions produce valuable insights that might have been missed in a less ambitious book.

Cohen’s thesis, stated most concisely, is that “we are overhistoricized and undercritical” (History 125). He opposes the reductionism of what he variously labels “normative criticism,” “university-based legitimations of criticism,” and “the explanatory models of modern thought.” He nevertheless upholds a firm notion of critique throughout History Out of Joint. In one intervention that I examine at length because it exemplifies the book’s analytical labor, Cohen associates Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1998) with a trend toward “anticriticism” (155). Cohen continues to pursue the concern with academic criticism of his earlier Academia and the Luster of Capital and Passive Nihilism, but expands his focus beyond that of a single institutional formation and discursive practice to include the contemporary cultural field in general. In History Out of Joint he also considers popular representations of history and the historian, such as those advanced in Los Angeles Times editorials. The interest of the book consequently far exceeds the specific disciplinary frame professional historians would likely bring to it.

Despite many apparent and some actual similarities between Cohen’s work and Hayden White’s, Cohen distinguishes his critical revaluation from White’s metahistorical and tropological analysis. Having denied the possibility of applying critical insight from historiography to the real, Cohen moves from forms of order and patterning to those of contingency and alterity—from, as he announces, narrative to event. White, accounting in Metahistory (1973) for the deep structure of the nineteenth-century European historical imagination, and in Tropics of Discourse (1978) for recurrent figurations traced back as far as Vico that offer “the key to an understanding of the Western discourse about consciousness” (12), examines the importance of narrative and rhetorical conventions in historical writing. “Metahistory,” as its project is summarized in History Out of Joint, examines “the conditions of possibility in the writing of a narrative (the use of criteria to select things to narrate)” (168), whereas Cohen, confining himself to the present or to the recent past of modernity, engages ongoing cultural debates in the absence of a shared, pre-constituted language. In a thoroughly “out of...